3 Minutes On: Thanksgiving

Cookbook author and culinary historian Sheilah Kaufman, CAS/BA '64, explains the history behind the November feast

as told to Gregg Sangillo

We usually trace the first
Thanksgiving to a three-day festival in 1621,
though the Pilgrims likely never used the word "Thanksgiving." The feast
followed the Pilgrims' arduous, 66-day journey from England to Plymouth, Massachusetts. Suffering through
a harsh winter, about half of the colonists died from scurvy and contagious diseases.

Early on they interacted with a
Native American man named Squanto, who taught them how to cultivate corn,
extract sap from maple trees, and catch fish in the rivers. Through Squanto,
the Pilgrims forged an alliance with the local Wampanoag tribe. Different chroniclers wrote that Plymouth Colony
governor William Bradford sent four men to get wild ducks, geese, turkey, and
rabbits for the Thanksgiving feast, and the Wampanoag guests brought five deer.
They also competed in games throughout the celebration. (This was really the only period of peace and harmony between the American Indians and the
colonists.)

According to Plymouth plantation
records, the feast probably included broiled lobster, Indian cornmeal, cod,
stewed pumpkin, and roasted venison with mustard sauce. Historians believe many
of the dishes were likely prepared using traditional Native American spices. And since the Pilgrims had no ovens and
very little sugar, they didn't have the desserts that we enjoy today.

Feasting at harvest time is an
ancient tradition, tracing back to the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Jews
celebrate the holiday of Sukkot, and Native Americans themselves had a
tradition of feasting during the harvest. During the early colonial period,
Thanksgiving days were celebrated by different colonies and states, though
nobody used the same date.

To express
thanks for the end of the
Revolutionary War and the new Constitution of the United States, George
Washington issued a national Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789. During the
nineteenth century, author Sarah Josepha Hale launched a decades-long letter
writing campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. In 1863, Abraham
Lincoln issued a proclamation to "heal the wounds" of a country reeling from
the Civil War, and he declared a day of observation in late November. To jumpstart Christmas shopping, Franklin Roosevelt
moved Thanksgiving up on the calendar. But his plan was chastised—people called
it "Franksgiving"—and he officially made it the fourth Thursday of November.

I don't know
how turkey became the preeminent Thanksgiving
food. People eat a lot of chicken and fish, but most people don't eat turkey
that often. But turkey would have been plentiful—you could go out and shoot
one—and you could feed a lot of people with a 20-pound bird. That's probably why
stuffing became popular, too. Poor families needed foods they could stretch to
feed 10 kids. You're going to fill up pretty quickly on turkey, stuffing, corn,
and mashed potatoes.